Songs of Love and Death

from the clutches of the nice hooker with the handcuffs and the shaving kit, which, we realised, would be easier if we knew how to get back to where we’d left him, and looking for some clue to where we had left Rob, I found a card with the hotel’s address on it in my back pocket, so we headed back there and the last thing I did before we walked away from the canal and that whole strange evening was to pull the itchy Starsky-and-Hutch wig off my head and throw it into the canal.

It floated.

Scallie said, “There was a deposit on that, you know. If you didn’t want to wear it, I’d’ve carried it.” Then he said, “You should drop Cassandra a line.”

I shook my head. I wondered who he had been talking to online, who he had confused for her, knowing it definitely wasn’t Cassandra.

The thing about Cassandra is this: I’d made her up.

I WAS FIFTEEN, almost sixteen. I was awkward. I had just experienced my teenage growth spurt and was suddenly taller than most of my friends, self-conscious about my height. My mother owned and ran a small riding stables, and I helped out there, but the girls—competent, horsey, sensible types—intimidated me. At home I wrote bad poetry and painted water colours, mostly of ponies in fields; at school—there were only boys at my school—I played cricket competently, acted a little, hung around with my friends playing records (the CD was around, but they were expensive and rare, and we had all inherited record players and hi-fis from parents or older siblings). When we didn’t talk about music, or sports, we talked about girls.

Scallie was older than me. So was Rob. They liked having me as part of their gang, but they liked teasing me, too. They acted like I was a kid, and I wasn’t. They had both done it with girls. Actually, that’s not entirely true. They had both done it with the same girl, Caroline Minton, famously free with her favours and always up for it once, as long as the person she was with had a moped.

I did not have a moped. I was not old enough to get one, my mother could not afford one (my father had died when I was small, of an accidental overdose of anaesthetic, when he was in hospital to have a minor operation on an infected toe. To this day, I avoid hospitals). I had seen Caroline Minton at parties, but she terrified me and even had I owned a moped, I would not have wanted my first sexual experience to be with her.

Scallie and Rob also had girlfriends. Scallie’s girlfriend was taller than he was, had huge breasts, and was interested in football, which meant that Scallie had to feign an interest in football, Crystal Palace, while Rob’s girlfriend thought that Rob and she should have things in common, which meant that Rob stopped listening to the mid-80s electropop the rest of us liked and started listening to hippy bands from before we were born, which was bad, and that Rob got to raid her dad’s amazing collection of old TV series on video, which was good.

I had no girlfriend.

Even my mother began to comment on it.

There must have been a place where it came from, the name, the idea: I don’t remember though. I just remember writing “Cassandra” on my exercise books. Then, carefully, not saying anything.

“Who’s Cassandra?” asked Scallie.

“Nobody,” I said.

“She must be somebody. You wrote her name on your maths exercise book.”

“She’s just a girl I met on the skiing holiday.” My mother and I had gone skiing, with my aunt and cousins, the month before, in Austria.

“Are we going to meet her?”

“She’s from Reigate. I expect so. Eventually.”

“Well, I hope so. And you like her?”

I paused, for what I hoped was the right amount of time, and said, “She’s a really good kisser.” Then Scallie laughed and Rob wanted to know if this was French kissing, with tongues and everything, and I said, “What do you think,” and by the end of the day, they both believed in her.

My mum was pleased to hear I’d met someone. Her questions—what Cassandra’s parents did, for example —I simply shrugged away.

I went on three “dates” with Cassandra. On each of our dates, I took the train up to London, and took myself to the cinema. It was exciting, in its own way.

I returned from the first trip with more stories of kissing, and of breast-feeling.

Our second date (in reality, spent watching Weird Science on my own in Leicester Square) was, as told to my mum, holding hands together at what she still called “the pictures,” but as told to Rob and Scallie (and over that week, to several other school friends who had heard rumours from sworn-to-secrecy Rob and Scallie, and now needed to find out if it was true), the day I lost my virginity, in Cassandra’s aunt’s flat in London: The aunt was away, Cassandra had a key. I had (for proof) a packet of three condoms missing the one I had thrown away and a strip of four black-and-white photographs I had found on my first trip to London, abandoned in the basket of a photo booth on Victoria Station. The photo strip showed a girl about my age with long straight hair (I could not be certain of the colour. Dark blond? Red? Light brown?) and a friendly, freckly, not unpretty, face. I pocketed it. In art class I did a pencil sketch of the third of the pictures, the one I liked the best, her head half- turned as if calling out to an unseen friend beyond the tiny curtain. She looked sweet, and charming.

I put the drawing up on my bedroom wall, where I could see it from my bed.

After our third date (it was Who Framed Roger Rabbit) I came back to school with bad news: Cassandra’s family was going to Canada (a place that sounded more convincing to my ears than America), something to do with her father’s job, and I would not see her for a long time. We hadn’t really broken up, but we were being practical: Those were the days when transatlantic phone calls were too expensive for teenagers. It was over.

I was sad. Everyone noticed how sad I was. They said they would have loved to have met her, and maybe when she comes back at Christmas? I was confident that by Christmas, she would be forgotten.

She was. By Christmas I was going out with Nikki Blevins and the only evidence that Cassandra had ever been a part of my life was her name, written on a couple of my exercise books, and the pencil drawing of her on my bedroom wall, with “Cassandra, February 19, 1985” written underneath it.

When my mother sold the riding stables in 1989, the drawing was lost in the move. I was at art college at the time, considered my old pencil-drawings as embarrassing as the fact that I had once invented a girlfriend, and did not care.

I do not believe I had thought of Cassandra for twenty years.

MY MOTHER SOLD the riding stables, the attached house, and the meadows to a property developer, who built a housing estate where it had once been, and as part of the deal, gave her a small, detached house at the end of Seton Close. I visit her at least once a fortnight, arriving on Friday night, leaving Sunday morning, a routine as regular as the grandmother clock in the hall.

Mother is concerned that I am happy in life. She has started to mention that various of her friends have eligible daughters. This trip we had an extremely embarrassing conversation that began with her asking if I would like to meet the church organist, a very nice young man of about my age.

“Mother. I’m not gay.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it, dear. All sorts of people do it. They even get married. Well, not proper marriage, but it’s the same thing.”

“I’m still not gay.”

“I just thought, still not married, and the painting, and the modelling.”

“I’ve had girlfriends, Mummy. You’ve even met some of them.”

“Nothing that ever stuck, dear. I just thought there might be something you wanted to tell me.”

“I’m not gay, Mother. I would tell you if I was.” And then I said, “I snogged Tim Carter at a party when I was at art college, but we were drunk and it never went beyond that.”

She pursed her lips. “That’s quite enough of that, young man.” And then, changing the subject, as if to get rid of an unpleasant taste in her mouth, she said, “You’ll never guess who I bumped into in Tesco’s last week.”

“No, I won’t. Who?”

“Your old girlfriend. Your first girlfriend, I should say.”

“Nikki Blevins? Hang on, she’s married, isn’t she? Nikki Woodbridge?”